LabBook January 25, 2013

White Sox catcher Tyler Flowers, conditioning coach Allen Thomas and Southpaw visited Woodlawn Community School this week as part of our new partnership with the White Sox to fight childhood obesity

Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the internet. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers.

PAST TWO WEEKS ON THE BLOG

Last week we caught up with Grant Fisher, a little boy who may be the youngest patient to receive a fecal transplant to treat severe digestive problems. Stacy Kahn, MD, who treated Grant, spoke to several news outlets about the treatment, which has been receiving a lot of coverage lately after a study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

On Monday we wrote about the work that neurobiologist Clifton Ragsdale, PhD, and Carrie Albertin, a grad student in his lab, are doing to sequence the genome of a species of octopus. It’s part of the new CephSeq Consortium, a group of researchers from around the world who study cephalopods—octopuses, squids, etc—and want to develop a set of reference genomes for these weird, wonderful creatures.

And finally, as you can see in the photo above, this morning we announced a partnership with the Chicago White Sox to fight childhood obesity. A key component of the partnership will be Power-Up, an after-school program created by Deborah Burnet, MD, offering weekly nutrition and physical activity sessions for children in kindergarten through the 6th grade at Woodlawn Community School. The foundation for the program, which launched in 2009, is a study led by Burnet that set out to determine whether school-based initiatives could be effective in helping to decrease obesity risks among children. The partnership has already received coverage from Crain’s Chicago Business.